Equal Financial Benefits? Title IX Gender Discrimination Behavior in National Collegiate Athletic Association Programs

Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments stipulates equal benefits to females and males in federally funded educational programs. A large sport finance empirical literature tests for Title IX compliance in National Collegiate Athletic Association athletics programs and interprets compliance according to proportional representation of female athletes. Quoting the legislation, we demonstrate that Title IX reaches more broadly than proportionality to require educational program benefits equality across gender. We examine expense-based financial support to women’s and men’s National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I basketball programs from 2006 to 2019, after scholarship-count based compliance was largely achieved. The sample implicitly matches on sport of play. Conditional on lagged-generated revenues, lagged-allocated revenues, school, and year of observation, we find women’s programs receive significantly and substantially less expected revenue-conditional expense funding (slope effect) and expected revenue nonconditional expense funding (level effect), a two-part funding deficit. Resulting Oaxaca–Blinder–Kitagawa decomposition estimates a $383,000 ($2,076,000) expected women’s program funding deficit at mean women’s (men’s) annual program revenue.